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AN 



ADDRESS 



DELIA'^ERED BEFORE 



THE ASSOCIATION 



OF 



THE ALUMNI OF HARVARD COLLEGE, 



BY 



ROBERT C.'WINTHROP 



JULY 22, 1852. 



CAMBRIDGE: 
PUBLISHED BY JOHN BARTLETT 

1852. 



AN 



ADDRESS 



DELIVERED BEFOEE 



THE ASSOCIATION 



OF 



THE ALUMNI OF HARVARD COLLEGE. 



BY 



ROBERT C. WINTHROP 



JULY 22, 1852. 




< 




CAMBRIDGE 


- 


UBLISHED BY JOHN BARTLETT 


1852. 





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Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1852, by 

John Bartlett, 

in the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the District of Massachusetts. 



RIVERSIDE, CAMBRIDGE: 
PiaXTED BY II. O. HOUGHTON AND COMPANY. 



Harvard, "most reverend head, to whom I owe 

All that I am in arts, all that I know ; — 

(How nothing's that!) — to whom my country owes 

The great renown and name wherewith she goes : — 

Many of thine this better could, than I, 

But for their powers, accept my piety." 



At a meeting of the Executive Committee of the Association of the Alumni 
of Harvard College, held at Cambridge, 22d July, 1852, 

Resolved, that the thanks of the Association be presented to the Hon. 
KoBERT C. Vv^iNTHKOP, for his tnily eloquent and appropriate Address, 
delivered this day, at the request of the Association, and that he be requested 
to furnish a copy of the same for the press. 

True copy from the record. Attest, 

Nathaniel B. Shurtleff, Secretan/. 



ADDRESS 



In rising, Mr. President and Brethren, to perform 
the distinguished part in the services of this morning, 
Avhich has been assigned me by your Executive Com- 
mittee, it is a real relief to me to reflect, how little, 
after all, the success of this occasion will depend, on 
the character of the entertainment which may be 
afforded you, during the brief hour which I may be at 
liberty to occupy, by any thing of formal or ceremo- 
nious discourse. 

It is not by words of wisdom or of dulness, it is not 
by arguments forcible or feeble, it is not by appeals 
animated or vapid, it is not by pathos or by bathos, 
that an occasion like this is to be made or marred. 

The occasion itself is its own best and surest suc- 
cess. Certainly, it is its own best and most effective 
Orator. The presence of this vast concourse of the 
Sons of Harvard, drawn together by a common interest 
in the prosperity and welfare of their Alma Mater, and 
bound to each other by a common desire and a com- 
mon determination to uphold and advance her ancient 
character and renown, is enough to make this occa- 
sion forever memorable in her annals, and to secure for 
it a better, a more brilliant, and a far more enduring 



6 

success^ than any which could result from the jnost 
glowing display of individual eloquence. 

And, indeed, what could any one attempt at such a 
moment but to give expression, — a faint and imper- 
fect expression at the best, — to the sentiments and 
emotions which have already been awakened in all our 
hearts by the scene and the circumstances before us ? 
— emotions and sentiments too deep and serious, I am 
persuaded, to be satisfied with any mere ambitious 
rhetoric or jubilant oratory. 

We are assembled around the altars at which we 
were dedicated in our youth to the pursuit and attain- 
ment of a sound, liberal. Christian education, and from 
which we went forth in our early manhood to the 
duties and responsibilities of our respective professions 
and callings. We are here after many and various 
experiences of success and of failure, of joy and of 
sadness, of wealth and of want, in our subsequent 
career. We come, some of us, after but a brief trial 
of the stern realities of life, with the world all before 
us, and our relations to it still to be determined ; — 
some of us in the middle stage of our earthly course, 
in the full enjoyment of whatever faculties we possess, 
and of whatever position we have acquired ; — and 
some of us bending beneath the weight of years and 
of cares, with little more to hope or to fear for our- 
selves on this side the grave. How many thoughts 
are stirred within us all, as we look back, over a 
longer or a shorter interval, to the days when we first 
approached these Classic Halls ! How many reflec- 
tions crowd in upon each one of us, as to what we 
might have done, and what we did, then, — as to what 



we might have been, and what we are, notu ! How 
many blighted hopes and disappointed expectations of 
others or of ourselves are revived in our remembrance ! 
How many familiar forms of cherished friends, of 
beloved companions, of revered preceptors, long since 
parted from us, start up at our side, and seem almost 
to wait for our embrace ! 

" Rapt in celestial transport they, 
Yet hither oft a glance from high 
They send of tender sympathy 
To hless the place, where on their opening soul 
rii*st the genuine ardor stole ! " 

And we, too, Brethren, are here '^ to bless the place " 
of our earliest and best opportunities. We come, one 
and all, to bear our united testimony to the value of 
this venerated Institution. We come to bring what- 
ever laurels we have acquired, whatever treasures we 
have accumulated, to adorn its hallowed shrines. We 
come to pay fresh homage to the memory of our Fa- 
thers for having founded and reared it. We come to 
renew our tribute of gratitude to its earlier and its 
later Benefactors. We come to thank God for having 
prospered and blessed it. And we come, above all, to 
acknowledge our own personal indebtedness to it, and 
to make public recognition of the manifold obligations 
and responsibilities, to God and to man, which rest 
upon us all, by reason of the opportunities and advan- 
tages which we have here enjoyed. 

We are here, I need not say, in no spirit of vain- 
glorious boastfulness or empty self-congratulation. 
We are here to arrogate nothing to ourselves in the 
way of distinction or privilege. We are here to set up 
no claim to peculiar consideration or honor on account 



8 

of the titular dignities or parchment prerogatives which 
have been conferred upon us from yonder antique 
chair. We are not blind to the fact, that there are 
those around us, who have enjoyed none of our Aca- 
demic opportunities, and who have yet outstripped not 
a few of us in the practical pursuits of literature and 
of life. We do not forget that there are some of them, 
who have surpassed us all in the highest walks of Art, 
of Science, and of Patriotic Statesmanship. Honor, 
honor this day from this assembled multitude of Scho- 
lars, to the self-made, self-educated, men, who have 
adorned and are still adorning our country's history. 
Honor to the common schools of our land, from which 
such men have derived all which they have not owed 
to their own industry, their own energy, their own 
God-given genius. Bowditch, Fulton, Franklin, Wash- 
ington, — to name no others among the dead or among 
the living, — when will any American University be 
able to point to names upon its catalogue of Alumni 
which may be likened to these names, for the original- 
ity and profoundness of the researches, for the prac- 
tical imp'ortance of the accom^plishments, for the grand- 
eur and sublimity of the inventions and discoveries, 
or for the noble achievements and glorious institutions, 
with which they are indissolubly associated ! Well 
may we say, as we proudly inscribe their names upon 
our honorary rolls, — " they were wanting to our glory ; 
we were not wanting to theirs." 

Nor are we here, Mr. President and Brethren, to 
indulge in any invidious comparisons between our own 
University and other Universities and Colleges in the 
State or in the Nation. It is pardonable, to say the 



9 

least, to love one's own mother better than other peo- 
ple's mothers. It is natural that we should 

"Be to her faults a little blind, 
Be to her virtues very kind." 

Indeed, as we run our eyes over the long list of her 
children, and see what a goodly fellowship of Prophets, 
what a glorious company of Apostles, she has sent 
forth into every field of Christian service; — as we 
turn back to that first Commencement, on the 5th day 
of October in the year 1642, when " nine bachelors 
commenced at Cambridge, young men of good hope 
and performed their acts, so as gave good proof of 
their proficiency in the tongues and arts," * — and 
thence follow her along her starry way for more than 
two centuries, — we might be almost pardoned for for- 
getting that she has, or ever had, any faults. And 
could we but see something of a higher moral disci- 
pline, something of a deeper religious sentiment, some- 
thing of a stronger spiritual influence, mingling with 
the sound scholarship which pervades her Halls, and 
giving something of a fresher and fuller significance 
to her ancient motto, " Christo et Ecclesice ; " — could we 
but see a little more of that state of things here, which 
Thomas Arnold contemplated, when he nobly declared 
at Hugby — " It is not necessary that this should be a 
school of three hundred or of one hundred or of fifty, 
but it is necessary that it should be a school of Christ- 
ian Gentlemen,^ — there would be little or nothing 
more to be desired in her condition. 

I pretend not to know how this common want of 
almost all Seminaries of instruction is to be supplied. 

* Winthrop's New England, Savage's ed. vol. ii.p. 87. 



10 

But, ! let us be careful that the indulgence of secta- 
rian jealousies do not result in a downright divorce 
between education and religion. Let us be watchful, 
lest our disposition to do away all color for the idea of 
a State Religion, shall terminate in banishing religion 
from our Eepublican Schools. Better, a thousand-fold 
better, that a Seminary like this should be under the 
steady, effective, aye, or even exclusive influence, of 
any one religious sect, than that it should be without 
the influence of some sort of vital Christianity. Let 
us, if we can, and as far as we can, so blend .the rays 
which are reflected from every diflerent view of the 
Bible, that they shall form one harmonious beam of 
Holy Light, streaming in at every door and window 
and loophole of our Halls and Chapels, and casting 
golden glories upon every pinnacle and buttress and 
tower. But let us be cautious, that in attempting to 
shut out any one particular ray which may be ima- 
gined to predominate in our Academic atmosphere, we 
take no risk of shutting out the glorious sunshine of 
the Gospel, and of leaving the Institution, in this day 
of its highest intellectual advantages, in a condition of 
spiritual darkness, — 

" Dark, dark, dark, amid the blaze of noon, — 
Irrecoverably dark, total eclipse, 
Without all hope of day ! » 

But whatever degree of affectionate interest and 
concern we may cherish towards this oldest of our 
American Colleges, and however proud we may be to 
hail her this day as our own great parent, we are not 
assembled in any spirit of hostility or indifference to 
the success and welfare of others. We do not forget 



11 

how many of the most brilliant luminaries of our land, 
how many even of the bright, particular stars of our 
own immediate sphere, have drawn their light from 
other fountains. Amherst and Williams, Columbia and 
Union, William and Mary, Hampden and Sidney, 
South Carolina and New Jersey, Maryland, Middle- 
bury, Brown, Yale, Bowdoin, and Dartmouth ; — all 
these, and many more than these, I need not say, have 
sent forth sons to adorn and bless their native land, 
and the Alumni of Harvard rejoice this day in the 
progress and prosperity of them all, and offer to their 
children the right hand of a cordial, fraternal fel- 
lowship. 

Nor do we forget, in the good wishes of the occa- 
sion, those renowned and reverend Universities of Old 
England, from one of which our own was named, in 
one of which the founder of our own, and many more 
of the early fathers of New England, were educated, 
and to which Literature, and Science, and Art are 
indebted for so vast a preponderance of their trea- 
sures. 

Yes, Brethren, wherever, beneath the sky, young 
men are gathered together for the purposes of a libe- 
ral, classical. Christian education, there are our hearts 
at fhis hour in the midst of them. While we would 
never forget our allegiance to the State and the Nation 
of which we are citizens, we yet feel, to-day, that we 
belong to a Republic broader and more comprehensive 
than either of them ; — a Republic whose history runs 
back through centuries and cycles of centuries past, 
and looks forward through centuries and cycles of 
centuries to come, — which embraces all languages 



12 

and tongues and kindreds and people, linking together 
in one great society " the noble living and the noble 
dead " ; — a Republic, in reference to which we know 
no points of the compass, no degrees of latitude, and 
for whose advancement, prosperity, and perpetual 
union, we can never cease to strive ; — a Republic, in 
regard to which we reverse all our wishes in relation 
to our own political confederacy, and pray God that 
its limits may be extended, wider and wider, by pur- 
chase, by negotiation, by annexation, spoliation, and 
conquest, until, bounding its dominions by the seas 
and its fame by the stars, it shall realize the dream of 
Universal Empire ! 

And now, Mr. President and Brethren, coming here, 
as I hope and believe we all have, in this liberal and 
catholic spirit, and recognizing our relations to this 
large and comprehensive society, we cannot but feel 
that there are peculiar obligations and responsibilities 
resting upon us all as educated men; — and it is to a 
consideration of some of these responsibilities, and of 
some of the temptations which interfere with their just 
discharge, that I propose to devote what remains of 
this address. 

Whatever may be pronounced to be the great end 
and object of a liberal education, there can be no doubt 
or difference of opinion as to one of its ejQfects on those 
who enjoy its advantages. I mean its influence in 
imparting to them, in a greater or less degree, powers 
and faculties of the utmost moment to the welfare of 
their fellow men ; — in communicating to them, in- 
deed, proportionately to their ability to grasp and 



13 

wield them, the very instruments by which the condi- 
tion of society, moral, religious, and political, is, and is 
to he, mainly controlled. 

The best result of all the inventions, discoveries, 
and improvements of modern times has been to give 
a wider and wider sway to intellectual and moral 
power. The world is fast ceasing to be governed by 
any mere material forces. The Metallic Ages, whether 
of ancient or of modern mythology, have passed away. 
And we have eminently reached a period of which the 
great characterizing and governing principle is Opinion 
— Public Opinion. Pervading the civilized world like 
that subtle and elastic fluid which philosophers of all 
ages have supposed to be diffused throughout the phy- 
sical Universe, — it is yet far more than any mere out- 
side atmosphere, far more than any mere circumam- 
bient, lumeniferous ether. It infuses itself into every 
joint of the social system. It penetrates the mighty 
mass of human motive and human action. It shapes, 
colors, directs, controls, and keeps in motion, (under 
God,) the whole course of public events ; realizing, so 
far as any mortal influence can realize, the spirit of the 
living creature in the wheels of the Prophet, or the 
familiar but sublime description of the Roman Poet, — 

" Spiritus intus alit ; totamque infusa per artus, 
Mens agitat molem, et magno se corpore miscet." 

It is itself, however, no mysterious, original, or un- 
changeable element. On the contrary, it is susceptible 
of every degree of impression and modification ; and 
its alterations and undulations are not only visible in 
their result, but are open to observation and analysis 
in the very progress and process of transition, and they 



14 

may be traced back and referred, directly and unmis- 
takably, to the causes which produced them. 

Public Opinion, in a word, is nothing less, and no- 
thing more, than the aggregate of individual opinions ; 
the resultant, if I may so speak, of all those various 
concurring or conflicting opinions which individuals 
conceive, express, and advocate. And it is from the 
character of the individual opinions which are, from 
day to day and from hour to hour, designedly thrown 
or accidentally dropped, into the ever-flowing current 
of Public Opinion, as it passes along, I had almost 
said, before our very doors and beneath our very win- 
dows, that it takes its color, form, direction, and force. 

Now the main instruments by which individual 
minds, in proportion to their natural or acquired 
energy, are brought to bear upon Public Opinion, or 
upon the public mind from which it emanates, are 
obviously the instruments which belong peculiarly to 
educated men. They are the precise instruments 
which it is one of the principal results of a liberal 
education to teach and facilitate the use of. I mean, 
I need not say, the Tongue, and the Pen. The word 
spoken, and the word written, — these are the simple, 
original elements of which all Public Opinion is com- 
posed ; — every word spoken, and every word written, 
entering into the composition, according to its quality 
and its power, — almost as every rain drop, and every 
dew drop, and even every misty exhalation, goes to 
color and swell the mountain stream or the ocean flood. 

It is not enough considered, I fear, by educated 
men, who are often among the most impatient and 
irritable, when false sentiments and mischievous no- 



15 

tions prevail on any subject, that they themselves, in 
their various avocations and professions, are mainly 
responsible for their existence. They are responsible, 
for what they say, and for what they leave unsaid ; 
for what they write, and for what they leave unwrit- 
ten ; for opinions which they take part in establishing, 
and for opinions which they take no part in overthrow- 
ing. It may be difficult for the bookworm, shut up in 
some dark alcove, and engaged in the preparation of 
some abstract philosophical or theological treatise, to 
realize that he has any thing to do with that mighty 
moral power, of whose edicts legislatures are so often 
but the formal recorders, and laws but the periodical 
proclamation, — which construes Constitutions, controls 
standing armies, supports or overturns thrones, and 
rules the world. So is it difficult to realize that the 
ocean-worm has had any thing to do with the Island 
or the Continent, which has yet risen from the sea 
through its labors, and which rests on the foundations 
which it has laid. But it behoves us all to remem- 
ber, that consciously or unconsciously, intentionally or 
accidentally, positively or negatively, each one of us, 
according to our opportunities, our powers, and our 
employment of them, is engaged at this moment, 
and at every moment, in the formation and direction 
of Public Opinion, and that each one of us has an in- 
dividual responsibility for its course and character. 

It is this responsibility, as developed and increased 
a thousand-fold by the circumstances of the age and 
of the land in which we, live, that I desire to illustrate 
and enforce. Consider, for a moment, the vast power 
and purchase, if I may so speak, which modern inven- 



16 

tions and modern institutions have given to the spoken 
and the written word ! Public Opinion, as an element 
of greater or less importance in the affairs of men, is by 
no means a new thing. There never could have been 
a moment since the existence of society, when there 
was not something of common sentiment among those 
associated in the same State or city or neighborhood, 
and when it must not have had more or less influence 
on their character and conduct. In the ancient Ke- 
publics of Greece and Rome, it was hardly a less 
potent engine of authority and government, so far as 
it extended, than it is among ourselves at the present 
day. But how far did it extend ? What were the 
means which the Ancients enjoyed for instructing, 
controlling, and marshalling it to a purpose, compared 
with those which we now employ ? 

Look, for an instant, to the speakers and writers of 
antiquity, and see how far it was in their power to 
operate on the public mind of the world as they knew 
it, or of the age in which they lived. Take the very 
Prince of ancient orators — of all orators whom the 
world has known — the Homer of eloquence, — as 
the modern Germans have well entitled him, — who 
" wielded at will the fierce democratic " of Athens. 
Follow him to one of the great scenes of his triumphs. 
See him ascending the Bema. Behold him, as looking 
round upon the Parthenon and the Propylsea, he 
inhales the inspiration of their massive grandeur and 
matchless symmetry, or, as darting a more distant 
glance towards the Piraeus, he catches the image of 
his country's power and prowess reflected from the 
shining beaks of her slumbering galleys 1 Listen to 



17 

him, as he pronounces one of those masterly and magni- 
ficent arguments, which must ever be the models of 
all true popular eloquence, and of which we may say, 
in his own words, " time itself seems to he the noblest 
witness to their glory, — a series of so many years 
hath now passed away, and still no men have yet ap- 
peared who could surpass those patterns of perfection." * 
The orator has concluded. The storm of applause 
has subsided. The vote has been taken — to succor 
the Olynthians, to resist Philip, or, it may be, to acquit 
Ctesiphon and banish ^schines. The Assembly is 
dispersed. But where are now the brilliant and burn- 
ing words which have kindled them into such a blaze 
of enthusiasm ? Have they been caught up, as they 
fell flaming from the lip, by a score of Reporters, as 
with the fidelity of a Daguerreotype ? Have they 
been wafted upon a kindred current to a hundred 
cities ? Have they, indeed, been 

'•^falmined over Greece, 
To Macedon and Artaxerxes' throne ? " 

Have they been served up in a thousand journals, 
to a hundred thousand readers, before another sunrise ? 
Have they even been put into a decent pamphlet for 
more convenient and deliberate perusal and reference ? 

No wonder that the great Athenian so emphatically 
pronounced the sum of all eloquence to be action. No 
wonder, that he exercised himself in speaking with 
pebbles in his mouth, and measured his voice against 
the roaring surges of the sea. The orators of antiquity 
spoke only to their immediate audience. They could 

* Oration on the Classes. 



18 

address themselves to nobody else. It was upon the 
living multitude before them that an influence was to 
be produced; or not at all. Their power was limited by 
the number of persons assembled to hear them, or 
even more limited by the strength of their own lungs. 
The 6000 men who were necessary to constitute a 
psephisma or decree, or, at the very most, the 20,000 
men who enjoyed the right of suffrage, were all to 
whom Demosthenes could appeal, — all upon whom his 
magic words and mighty thoughts could operate. He 
spoke to Athens j and 

" Athens, the eye of Greece, mother of arts 
And eloquence, native to famous wits 
Or hospitable," — 

was a city just about the size of Boston, with a popu- 
lation of only 140,000 in all, men, women, children 
and slaves ; — and the whole territory of Attica was 
not more than an eighth part of our own little Massa- 
chusetts.* 

Fortunately, most fortunately for posterity, Demos- 
thenes had too much distrust of himself, or too muck 
respect for the people of Athens, to venture upon any 
great effort, without having previously prepared in 
writing the greater part, if not the, whole, of what he 
was going to say. Fortunately, he was not ashamed 
to have it said, that " all his arguments smelled of the 
lamp ; " but could calmly reply to a profligate and 
insulting rival who cast it in his teeth, — " yes, indeed, 
my friend, but your lamp and mine are not conscious 
to the same labors." His lamp has thus proved to be 
one of the great and shining lights of the world. His 

* Boeckh's Public Economy of Athens, ch. vii, 



19 

orations have thus come down to us, not, perhaps, in 
all the perfection in which the orations of our own 
Demosthenes,* edited by our own Cicero, will go down 
to posterity, — but in a comparatively perfect shape. 
And it is hardly too much to say, — looking to all the 
students and scholars and literary men, throughout the 
world, who now read them, in the original or in trans- 
lations, that a greater number of minds are moved, 
instructed, and delighted by their matchless eloquence 
in any ten years, — I had almost said, in any single 
year, — at the present day, than during the whole 
period of his own life. But, I repeat, their immediate 
influence upon the public opinion of his own day, was 
limited to the few thousands of freemen, — for women, 
and children, and slaves were excluded, — to the few 
thousands of freemen, who could be driven by the 
Lexiarchs, with their scarlet cords, and under penalty 
of a fine, within the 12,000 square yards which consti- 
tuted the area of the Pnyx, — or within the still 
smaller space which was covered by the Theatre of 
Bacchus. 

Turn with me now to the writers of antiquity, and 
reflect on the means which they possessed of influ- 
encing the public opinion of their own time. Think, for 
an instant, of an ancient philosopher, historian, politi- 
cian or poet, sitting down with his stylus or his cala- 
mus, and with his tablets of wood or of w^ax, or his 
sheets of bark or of vellum, to prepare an essay, or an 
exposition, or a satire, or a leading article of any sort, 



* This allusion could hardly be rendered more distinct to any one who has 
seen a copy of " The Works of Daniel Webster," as recently edited by Edward 
Everett. 



20 

with the view of producing an immediate impression 
on a pending question. The very idea seems little 
better than a joke. How is it to he multiplied ? How 
is it to he circulated ? Who is to know any thing 
about it; within any assignable period^ save the author 
himself, the slaves who may copy it, or the friends to 
whom he may read it, at the bath or the supper, in the 
garden or the school ? How many persons of their 
own time, think you, could have been roused by the 
Panegyric of Isocrates, or been charmed with the his- 
tory of Herodotus, had they not been recited at the 
Olympic Games ? Where, but for this, would have 
been the inspiration and emulation which produced the 
immortal work of Thucydides ? 

It is hardly too much to say, that the ancients could 
have composed none of their writings with a view to 
immediate, general influence as writings. The cum- 
brous and clumsy character of their writing materials, 
— which must have rendered the briefest Ullet doux 
hardly more manageable for slipping slily into a fair 
hand, than a modern Family Bible or one of yesterday's 
Bachelor diplomas, — obviously precluded that ready 
multiplication and circulation of copies, which such a 
purpose would have required. They spoke, as we have 
seen, to the present ; — but they must have written to 
the future, — if, indeed, they were conscious of writing 
for anybody except (as the admirable Niebuhr would 
seem to suggest) for the friends to whom they dedi- 
cated their books.* And who can cease to wonder that 
so many noble works of philosophy and history and 
poetry should have been composed under such discou- 

^ Niebuhr's Letter to Count de Serre, 9 February, 1823. 



21 

raging circumstances ? Who can cease to wonder that 
such splendid diction, such magnificent imagery, such 
sublime sentiment and glowing narration, should have 
been reached without the inspiration which modern 
authors seek and find in the prospect of immediate 
and wide-spread publication and perusal ? How, like a 
caged eagle, must the soul of Cicero have chafed itself 
against the bars and barriers by which its utterances 
were restrained and hindered ! How deeply must he 
have felt the force of such considerations as he has put 
into the mouth of Africanus, in that exquisite literary 
Torso — the dream of Scipio — to prove that there 
was "no glory worthy of a wish, to be obtained from 
the praise of men ! " 

" Of this little world," says he, " the inhabited parts 
are neither numerous nor wide ; even the spots where 
men are to be found are broken by intervening deserts, 
and the nations are so separated as that nothing can 
be transmitted from one to another. With the people 
of the South, by whom the opposite part of the world 
is possessed, you have no intercourse -, and by how 
small a tract do you communicate with the countries 
of the North ? The Territory which you inhabit is no 
more than a scanty island, inclosed by a small body of 
water, to which you give the name of the Great Sea 
and the Atlantic Ocean. And even in this known and 
frequented continent, what hope can you entertain 
that your renown will pass the stream of Ganges or 
the cliffs of Caucasus ? Or, by whom will your name 
be uttered in the extremities of the North or South, 
towards the rising or the setting sun ? " 

! could the incomparable Roman, with that burn- 



22 

» 

ing love of fame which not even his own divine philo- 
sophy could extinguish, with that restless craving for 
applause and notoriety which nothing but his splendid 
genius and sublime energy could have saved from con- 
temptj — could 'he, by means of some of the auguries 
and vaticinations to which he so often appealed, have 
caught a glimpse of the great discoveries and inven- 
tions, by which not only has the old world, as he knew 
it, been almost immeasurably enlarged, but a new one 
added to it, and the great centres and capitals of them 
both brought nearer together than even Rome and 
Athens were in his own day ; — * could he have fore- 
seen, too, that marvellous mystery of Koster, and Faust, 
and Guttenberg, and Schoeffer, and have known that 
among the first uses to which it should be applied was 
the printing of his own Treatises de Senedide and de 
Officiis, t and that from that day forward his Orations 
and Disputations and Essays should be a standard work 
in every library beneath the sun, the companions and 
counsellors and consolers of the greatest minds of all 
ages, — who shall say to what new heights of specula- 
tion, to what brighter heaven of invention he might 
not have mounted ! With how much bolder and more 
confident an emphasis would he not have uttered those 

* Cicero, writing to his wife from Athens, says, — " Acastus met me upon my 
landing, with letters from Eome, having heen so expeditious as to perform his 
journey in one-and-twenty days." 

t Complete printing dates from 1452. There was a German edition of the 
De Officiis in 1466 5 — and the following is the title of the second book ever 
printed in England : 

'• The hoke of Tulle of Old age emprynted by me simple persone William Caxton 
in to Englysslie as the playsir solace Sf reverence of men cjrowynge in to old age the 
xij day of August they ere of our lord Mxccclxxxj" 

It was printed within the precincts of Westminster Abbey, where the first 
printing press in England was erected by Caxton in 1471. 



prophetic words — "Ego, vero, omnia quae gerebam, 
jam turn in gerendo, spargere me ac disseminare arbit- 
rabar in orbis terrae memoriam sempiternam." He 
would not, then, have been found looking so eagerly and 
so imploringly for his standing with posterity to the 
poetry of an Archias, or to the history of a Luc- 
ceius,* — names, which, as it happens, have owed their 
own preservation from oblivion to his orations and 
letters; but he would have felt and realized, as all 
the world now realizes, that nothing but his own glow- 
ing and glorious words were needed to perpetuate the 
memory of his own noble and heroic life ! 

And now, Mr. President, if we turn to the writers 
and speakers of the present age, and to the means 
which they enjoy of moulding and marshalling the 
Public Opinion of our own day, the contrast is too 
obvious and too glaring to require, or even to bear, a 
word of comment. 

It would perhaps be an extravagant remark, were I 
to say that the last thing which a speaker of modern 
times cares about, is the number or the character of 
his audience. It would certainly be a most ungracious 
remark for one standing in the immediate presence, and 
appealing to the immediate indulgence, of so distin- 
guished and brilliant an assembly. Great results, I 
know, are to be produced, and great results are often, 

* There are few things more remarkahle in literary history than the letter of 
Cicero to Lucius Lucceius, in which, after acknowledging that he has a strong 
passion for being celebrated in the writings of Lucceius, and assuring him that 
he will find the subject not unworthy of his genius and eloquence, he adds, — 
" I will venture, then, earnestly to entreat you not to confine yourself to the 
strict laws of history, but to give a greater latitude to your encomiums than, 
possibly, you may think my actions can claim." 



24 

in factj produced, in these days as in days of yore, by 
the influence of the spoken word upon the many or the 
few who hear it. And much greater results might be 
accomplished in this way, than any which are witnessed 
in modern time.^, if the voice, the manner, the emphasis, 
the gesture, the whole art of oratory were more care- 
fully studied and cultivated. There are many occa- 
sions, moreover, when present, practical, and most 
important consequences depend upon the success of an 
immediate oratorical effort. In the Pulpit, that noblest 
of all rostrums, and at the Bar, the first business of the 
speaker is to instruct, animate, convince, and carry 
away captive, if possible, those whom he directly 
addresses. Now and then, too, there is a popular meet- 
ing, or a legislative assembly, at which great measures 
are to be lost or won, great principles vindicated or 
overthrown, momentous issues finally made up and 
decided. Nor have there been wanting among us 
those able to meet such emergencies. 

I deem it to be no disparagement to any one, among 
the living or the dead, to express the opinion, in this 
connection, that for immediate power over a delibera- 
tive or a popular audience, no man in our Republic, 
since the Republic has had a name or a being, has ever 
surpassed the great Statesman of the West, over whom 
the grave is just closing.* His words will not be 
referred to in future years, like those of some of his 
contemporaries, for profound expositions of permanent 
principles, or for luminous and logical commentaries 
upon the Constitution or the laws. But for the deep 
impressiveness and almost irresistible fascination of his 

* Henry Clay. 



25 

immediate appeals, for prompt, powerful, persuasive, 
commanding, soul-stirring eloquence upon whatever 
theme was uppermost in his large, liberal, and patriotic 
heart, he has had no superior, and hardly an equal, in 
our country's history. Owing nothing to the schools — 
nothing to art or education — he has furnished a noble 
illustration of what may be accomplished by the fire 
of real genius, by the force of an indomitable will, by 
the energy of a constant and courageous soul, uttering 
itself through the medium of a voice, whose trumpet 
tones will be among the cherished memories of all who 
ever heard it, and which God never gave to be the 
organ of any thing less than a master-mind. 

But how little, under all ordinary circumstances, is 
the influence of a modern speaker confined by the acci- 
dents of voice or of audience ? I have heard, and you, 
Mr. President,* have far more frequently heard, a past 
or a present Premier of England, rising at midnight, 
in a little room hardly more ample or more elegant 
than many of our common country school-houses or 
Town Halls, and in the presence of two or three hun- 
dred rather drowsy gentlemen, and with not half a 
dozen hearers besides ourselves in the galleries, diplo- 
matic box and all, pronounce words which not merely 
determined the policy of a Colossal Empire, but which, 
before another sun had set, were read, marked, learned 
and inwardly digested by the whole reading popula- 
tion of the United Kingdom, — and which before the 
next week had ended, had settled the judgment, and 

* Hon. Edward Everett, late American Minister at London, occupied the 
chair on this occasion, as President of the Association. 
4 



26 

fixed the public opinion of the whole continent of 
Europe^ on the subject to which they related. 

Nor need we cross the ocean for illustrations of this 
sort. Where can be found a more striking and im- 
pressive example of the pervading and almost miracu- 
lous power of the spoken word at the present day, 
than that which has been witnessed in our own land 
during the last few months ! A wandering exile from 
the banks of the Danube embarks for America. Fresh 
from a long and cruel imprisonmentjhe comes to thank 
our government and our people for the sympathy and 
succor to which; in part, he had owed his liberation. 
A Shakspeare and a Johnson's Dictionary, carefully 
studied during a previous confinement, have sufiiced 
to furnish him with a better stock of English than is 
possessed by the great majority of those to whom it is 
native, and he comes to pour forth in our own tongue 
the bitter sorrows and the stern resolves which had 
been so long pent up within his own aching breast. 
He comes to pray a great and powerful people to aid 
and avenge his downtrodden country. He lands upon 
our shores. He puts forth his plea. He speaks. And 
within one week from his first uttered word, the whole 
mind and heart and soul of this vast Nation is im- 
pressed and agitated. Domestic interests are forgot- 
ten. Domestic strifes are hushed. Questions of com- 
merce, and questions of compromise, and questions of 
candidacy, are postponed. New thoughts take posses- 
sion of all our minds. New words are in all our 
mouths. A new mission for our country is seriously 
mooted. The great name, the greater principles, of 



27 

Washington are suffered to be drawn into dispute, and 
even to be derided as temporary. And, for a moment, 
the ship of State seems reeling before the blast, and 
trembling, as for a fatal plunge, upon the verge of 
an unfathomed and unfathomable vortex, — while the 
voices of many an agonized patriot are heard exclaim- 
ing, as Horace exclaimed to the Roman Republic, — 

" Oh Navis, referent in mare te novi 
riuctus. O, quid agis 1 fortiter occupa 
Portum : Nonne vides, ut 
Nudum remigio latus, 
Et malus celeri saucius Africo, 
Antennaeque gemunt : 

Tu, nisi ventis 
Debes ludibrium, Cave." 

Thanks be to God, those voices have not been un- 
heeded. The sober, second thought has come apace. 
The danger is over. The cause of popular freedom 
and National Independence abroad has all our sym- 
pathy, and we may not be ready to declare, that under 
no circumstances shall it receive all our succor. But 
the case does not now exist, nor is it within the pros- 
pect of belief that any such case will soon exist, which 
can tempt us to peril our own peace, to disregard our 
own Constitution, to trample under foot the precepts 
and principles of the Father of his Country, and to 
involve and implicate the New World in the falling 
ruins and floating wrecks of the Old World, in the more 
than doubtful experiment of setting up Republics in 
Europe for Emperors or would-be Emperors to over- 
throw. The American masses are not capable of being 
fanaticized into such madness as this. Kossuth will 
be remembered by many of us, as he has been received 



28 

by us all, with the kindness, the respect, and even the 
admiration, which a man of real genius, of marvellous 
eloquence, of indomitable energy, hoping against hope, 
refusing to despair under circumstances of despera- 
tion, struggling against fate and in a holy cause, could 
never fail to inspire. But the great moral of his visit, 
the great lesson which he has left behind him, and 
one never to be forgotten, is that of the power of a 
single individual, of one earnest and heroic man, by 
the simple enginery of the tongue and the pen, to 
shake the solid mind of a whole nation, to agitate the 
mighty heart of a vast continent, and even to affect 
and modify the public opinion and the public affairs of 
the world. 

We have heard something. Brethren, of the power of 
the tongue in other ages. The Apostle James, even in 
his day, spoke " of a little member which boasteth 
great things, an unruly evil, which no man can tame, 
Avhich setteth on fire the course of nature, and is set 
on fire " — I need not say how. And Shakspeare, in 
later times, exclaims, with but too much truth, — 

" In law, what plea so tainted and corrupt, 
But, being seasoned with a gracious voice. 
Obscures the show of evil ! " 

But how little did either of them dream of the vast 
reach and purchase which the tongue and the voice 
have acquired in these latter days. Never, never, 
before, certainly, has anybody realized, as we realize 
at this hour, the immeasurable powder for evil or for 
good, which modern arts and inventions and institu- 
tions have imparted to those great instruments of 
civilized, educated man, — the spoken and the written 



29 

word. It is no longer the mad conceit of some Anar- 
charsis Cloots, that a man may be an orator of the 
human race. It is no longer the ridiculous ranting of 
some Bombastes Furioso which exclaims^ " Attention, 
the universe ! " There are writers and speakers in the 
Old World and in the New World, to whom the uni- 
verse of intelligent, civilized man, pays willing, prompt, 
and eager attention, and of whom it is hardly an exag- 
geration to say, that " their line is gone out through 
all the earth, and their words to the end of the world." 
The world, indeed, has become one vast ivUspering 
gallery, in which all that is said is everywhere heard, 
and all that is worth hearing is everywhere listened to. 
Would that we could stop here ! But that is not all. 
That is not all. It is not only the truly great and 
good W'hose words and thoughts are communicated to 
the ears and to the hearts of this world-wide audience. 
Types and telegraphic wires are no discriminating 
media, and the press has but too truly fulfilled the 
paradox of the fountain that pours forth sweet waters 
and bitter. 

It was most strikingly said by Charles Babbage, in 
his " Ninth Bridgewater Treatise," that " the pulsations 
of the air, once set in motion by the human voice, 
cease not to exist with the sounds to which they give 
rise." "Every atom (says he) impressed with good 
and with ill, retains at once the motions which philo- 
sophers and sages have imparted to it, mixed and com- 
bined in ten thousand ways with all that is worthless 
and base." "The air. itself (he exquisitely adds) is 
one vast Library, on whose pages are forever written 
all that mian has ever said, or even whispered. There, 



30 

in their mutable but unerring characters, mixed with 
the earliest as well as the latest sighs of mortality, 
stand forever recorded, vows unredeemed, promises 
unfulfilled, perpetuating in the united movements of 
each particle, the testimony of man's changeful will." 

And however fanciful this may be regarded as a 
physical theory, it finds but too much confirmation 
in its application to the moral world. The moral, if not 
the physical, atmosphere around us, receives, retains, 
and holds in constant combination all that is uttered 
and all that is published of the false, the immoral, 
the licentious, the sceptical, the mystical, the pro- 
fane, with all that is uttered and all that is pub- 
lished of the true, the pure, the beautiful, the noble, 
the divine ; and all enter alike, according to their pro- 
portions and their power, into that great encircling 
stream of Public Opinion which turns the wheels of all 
human action. The arts and inventions of modern 
times, have spread out over the earth one vast ^olian 
lyre, with a responsive note for every articulate opinion 
by which its myriad strings are swept. They have 
woven, as it were, one all-pervading nervous system 
over the whole range of civilized society, along which 
emotions of every sort vibrate from breast to breast, 
and leap from heart to heart, to meet, to mingle, to 
strengthen or dilute, to purify or corrupt, or it may be 
only to counteract and neutralize each other. They 
have constructed for all the world a machinery hardly 
less effective than than that ingenious and admirable 
Fire Alarm which is stretching its mysterious wires, 
and shooting its magical messages, from spire to spire 
of yonder neighboring metropolis ; and they have 



31 

placed its keys peculiarly in the hands of educated 
men. It is ours to use them for rousing up mankind 
to heroic acts of rescue and reform, for startling them 
from the slumbers of ignorance, of sensuality, and of a 
worse than African bondage, for rallying them in the 
path of disinterested humanity and Christian warfare, 
and for awakening and animating them to the extin- 
guishment of the flames of evil passions, inordinate 
affections, and unruly wills. And it is no less ours, 
alas, to pervert and abuse them to the purpose of dis- 
turbing, disorganizing, and debauching society, by 
false alarms and factious appeals, by rash speculations 
and reckless hue-and-cry. 

What solemn responsibilities do such considera- 
tions imply as resting in these days upon educated 
men ! What fresh and fearful significance do they 
attach to the declaration of Holy Writ that for every 
idle word we are to be held to account ! What new 
and momentous motives do they suggest for taking 
heed what we speak, and what we write ! How much 
better and purer and nobler a Literature might we 
not have, and how much more just and elevated a 
Public Sentiment as its result, if every man who is 
educated to the use of the pen or of the tongue, could 
be made to feel within himself, as he sits down to his 
desk or rises to the rostrum, — " The word that I write 
or that I speak to-day is not for the moment or for 
myself alone. It is not mine, to minister merely to 
my own pleasure, to my own profit, to my own fame. 
It is not mine, to pander to some popular delusion, to 
fan some popular prejudice, to flatter some popular 
flivorite, or to adorn some plausible falsehood. It is to 



oA 

produce an influence far beyond that which it immedi- 
ately proposes. It is to enter, somewhere, in a greater 
or less degree, into the very springs and issues of 
human action. It may influence individuals. It may 
influence masses. It cannot rest indiflerent. It can- 
not return unto me empty. It will mingle with the 
great current of Public Opinion in some part of its 
course, — where it winds through some quiet valley, 
or takes its way beneath some cottage window, if not 
where it foams and roars around some splendid capitol 
or some mighty metropolis. This very word which I 
speak or write to-day, may rouse up a resolute human 
soul to a newer and better life, or it may turn back 
some timid and wavering spirit from its truest and best 
ends, unsettle its faith, unship its anchor, and leave it 
wrecked for time and for eternity. It may stir the 
breast of a mighty nation to the maintenance of law or 
the vindication of liberty ; or it may stimulate and 
infuriate it to the overthrow of the noblest institutions, 
in a mad pursuit of impracticable philanthropies and 
reforms. It may elevate and ennoble the hopes and 
views and aims of mankind, and advance the cause of 
peace on earth and good-will among men ; or it may 
blow up the smouldering embers of international strife, 
and kindle a conflagration which shall wrap a world in 
flames. I am, I must be, responsible for the result. I 
can no longer pour out immorality, infidelity, profanity, 
sedition, slander, with impunity. Everywhere there 
are ears to hear, eyes to read, tongues to repeat, instru- 
ments to communicate, hearts and minds to imbibe and 
comprehend." 

And such a responsibility must be felt, must be 



cherished, must be inculcated, must be enforced, 
wherever a tongue is wagged or a pen is wielded. 
Responsibility, — not responsibility merely in the 
sacred forum of law — not responsibility, ever, on 
the falsely-called field of honor, — but moral and 
religious responsibility, for what we speak, for what 
we write, for what we publish, must be solemnly 
recognized and regarded, if our boasted liberty of 
speech and of unlicensed printing is not to be a curse 
to us. The censorship of conscience, in a word, must 
take the place of the old imprimaturs of kings and of 
cardinals, if a Free Press, the very trunk of our Lib- 
erty Tree, is not to find its only fit similitude in that 
well-remembered Beech tree of the Georgics, — 

" ^sculus, imprimis, qu^e quantum vertice ad auras 
^therias, tantura radice in Tartara tendit." =^ 

The temptations which interfere with the just ob- 
servance of the responsibilities of educated men, — 
in regard to which I proposed to say something also, 
on this occasion, — are, after all, only those which are 
common to almost every condition of life. 

There is poverty, inducing men to speak and to 
write for mere pay and reward, and to make all man- 
ner of unworthy compliances with the tastes, the 
follies, and the vices of the hour. And there is avarice, 
or a passion for wealth, whether to be spent or to be 
hoarded, by which men are led along in the courses to 
which, originally, their want, and not their will, may 
have consented. We may see, at every turn, pens and 

* " High as his topmost boughs to Heaven ascend. 
So low his roots to Hell's dominion tend." 
5 



o 



4 



tongues of the highest order, under influences like 
these, prostituted to the vilest purposes of hireling 
suhserviency. 

These, however, are common and vulgar influences, 
obvious to everybody, and which it is more than 
enough to have even named in this presence. 

But there are others, less gross in their nature and 
less revolting to a refined sensibility, which I may not 
pass over so lightly. I refer to literary vanity, to 
intellectual pride, to that hankering after notoriety, 
and that panting for individual celebrity and distinc- 
tion, which may all, perhaps, be comprehended in the 
single term, literary ambition. 

It has been quite customary to reserve this word 
amUtioiiy certainly in all its reproachful senses, for 
those who concern themselves with public and political 
affairs. We hear a great deal about ambitious politi- 
cians, and I am willing to admit that there are always 
enough of them, and more than enough, for the good 
of society, and that they often devote their pens and 
their tongues to the most unworthy and worthless pur- 
poses. 

But there are other varieties of ambitious men, of 
even a more permanently mischievous influence ; men 
who poison the current of public sentiment at its 
source, upon subjects more momentous than any mere 
ups-and-downs of political parties, to gratify their 
immediate longings for literary celebrity. 

The truth is, Mr. President, and it may as well be 
admitted freely, that literary celebrity and notoriety 
are not to be attained, in these days, under ordinary 
circumstances, by any very direct and honest courses. 
There are a few, always, 



35 

" Whom genius gives to shiue, 
Thro' every uiibora age and imdiscovered clime." 

But reading and writing are, in our times, so com- 
mon, knowledge is so abundant, education is so gene- 
rally diffused, learning is so widely spread, and even 
opportunities, in our own country at least, are so 
equally distributed, that the old distinctions and indi- 
vidualities of scholarship and of authorship have well- 
nigh disappeared. The air is full of speeches. And 
the world is full of books, — " outfolioing us out of our 
houses and homes," — to use an expressive phrase, 
which dropped from the lips of the most renowned 
living warrior of the world, as he was adding more 
shelves to the library of Apsley House. Almost every 
thing seems to have been said and written a hundred 
times over, upon almost every subject, and the field for 
literary fame to have been reaped and gleaned to the 
very last sheaf. 

Lockhart tells a charming story of Scott and Moore, 
sallying out one day for a walk through the planta- 
tions of Abbotsford, and talking, among other things, 
about the commonness of the poetic talent in these 
days. "Hardly a magazine is now published," said 
Moore, "that does not contain verses which, some 
thirty years ago, would have made a reputation." 
Scott turned with his look of shrewd humor, as if 
chuckling over his own success, and said, " Ah, we 
were in the luck of it to come before these fellows," 
but, he added, "we have, like Bobadil, taught them 
to beat us with our own weapons." ''In complete 
novelty I' says Moore, " he seemed to think lay the only 
chance for a man ambitious of high literary reputation 



36 

in these days." And so have evidently thought many 
others, both before and since. 

Hence the temptation to ambitious writers and 
speakers to quit the beaten tracks of truth, of reason, 
and of common sense, and to seek notoriety in extra- 
vagant conceits, startling theories, monstrous and mis- 
chievous speculations. And not a few of them have 
reminded us of the story which is somewhere told 
about Alexander of Macedon, who, baffled in his at- 
tempt to overrun and vanquish India, and finding him- 
self unable to achieve any real triumphs on that field, 
set himself deliberately to work to construct a camp 
thrice as large as even his own countless armies re- 
quired, and to prepare immense suits of armor fitted 
for the limbs of living giants, and huge sarcophagi as 
if for the remains of dead giants, and to build enor- 
mous stables with stalls and mangers capacious enough 
to accommodate horses thrice as large as even Buce- 
phalus himself, and finally to erect gigantic temples, 
with inscriptions dedicating them to Ammon as his 
father ; — and all to cover his own real want of suc- 
cess, and to delude those who should follow in his track 
into a false imagination of his extraordinary power, 
and his miraculous nature and origin. They deluded 
nobody, and were really the monuments of his failure, 
his folly, and his insatiate and insane ambition. 

Yery much of this sort was Jean Jacques Rousseau's 
scheme for gratifying his literary ambition. Burke 
tells us that Hume told him, " that he had from Bous- 
seau himself the secret of his principles of composition. 
That acute, though eccentric observer, (says he,) had 
perceived that to strike and interest the public, the 



37 

marvellous must be produced ; that the marvellous of 
heathen mythology had long since lost its effect ; that 
giants^ magicians, fairies, and heroes of romance, which 
succeeded, had exhausted the portion of credulity 
which belonged to their age ; that now nothing was 
left to a writer but that species of the marvellous which 
might still be produced, and with as great an effect as 
ever, though in another way ; — that is the marvellous 
in life, in manners, in characters, and in extraordinary 
situations, giving rise to new and unlooked for strokes 
in politics and morals." "I believe," added Burke, 
speaking of some of the writers of France in 1790, 
" that were Rousseau alive, and in one of his lucid 
intervals, he would be shocked at the practical frenzy 
of his scholars, who, in their very paradoxes are servile 
imitators; and even in their incredulity, discover an 
implicit faith." * 

Such were the avowed principles upon which the 
essays on the Inequalities of Human Condition, the 
Social Compact, the New Eloise, and the rest, were 
deliberately composed. And most effectually did they 
answer the end for which they were designed. They 
gave rise, in very truth, to new and unlooked for 
strokes in politics and in morals, and that, not merely 
on the written page, but in the practical drama of life. 
The tragic horrors of the French Eevolution, its shock- 
ing massacres, its revolting licentiousness, its bare- 
faced infidelity and atheism, found some of their 
strongest impulses and incentives in these writings of 
Rousseau. And thus, according to his own account, 
this bold, bad man, was seen ^liberately sapping and 

*' Burke's Works, Little and Brown, 1839, toI. iii. p. 200. 



38 

mining the very foundations of civil and political so- 
ciety, in order to gratify his personal vanity, by strik- 
ing and interesting the public in the production of 
the marvellous ! 

How well did the great poet of Ireland speak of 
him, — when visiting one of the scenes of his disgust- 
ing profligacy, as one, — 

" Who more than all that e'er have glowed 
With fancy's flame (and it was Ms 
In fullest w^armth and radiance) showed 
What an impostor Genius is ; — 

" How like a gem its light may smile 
O'er the dark spot hy mortals trod, 
Itself as mean a worm the while 
As crawls at midnight o'er the sod ; 

" What gentle words and thoughts may fall 
From its false lip, what zeal to bless, 
While home, friends, kindred, country, all, 
Lie waste beneath its selfishness." =* 

I fear, Brethren, that this principle of composition 
is not yet abandoned. I fear that we owe more than 
one work of later days to the same theory. I fancy, 
that more than one educated literary man, since Rous- 
seau's time, has sat down deliberately to calculate, 
without regard to the consequences to his country or 
to mankind, how he should go to work to strike and 
interest the public. I fancy that I hear more than 
one such person, as he burns with an unregulated and 
an unholy passion for mere fame, asking himself, — 
not what shall I say, or what shall I write, to benefit 
humanity, to enlighten and instruct my fellow men, 
and to repay to the future, or to the present, some of 

* Khymes on the Road, Extract X^L 



39 

the advantages which I have received from the past, — 
but what shall I speak or write to render myself an 
object of attention, distinction, and notoriety. 

" Tentanda via est, qak me quoque possim 
Tollere humo, victorque virum volitare per ora, — " 

Or, as old father Cowley has translated it, — 

'• What shall I do to be forever known, 
And make the age to come my own 1 " 

And I think I hear more than one such person, — 
to whom it has not been given to achieve greatness 
by any direct and manly means, and who despairs of 
turning any thing common, any thing good, any thing 
true, or just, or useful, to such an account, — I think 
I hear more than one such person answering in the 
precise vein of Jean Jacques ; — I must attempt some- 
thing strange and marvellous, something original and 
startling, something that may give rise to unlooked- 
for strokes in politics or in morals ; — I must leap to 
the antipodes of all received opinions in philosophy, 
in science, or in religion ; — I must pander to the vi- 
cious tastes and depraved appetites of the young and 
thoughtless ; — I must speculate on, and make capital 
out of, the noble sentiments and sympathies and phi- 
lanthropies of the ardent and generous; — I must 
arraign the most solemn principles and the most sacred 
institutions ; — I must defy the authority of Govern- 
ment, or, it may be, of God ; — I must deride all pecu- 
liar regard for one's native land, in swelling preten- 
sions of love for universal brotherhood, and show 
myself 

" A steady patriot of the world alone. 
The friend of everv conntry but mv own." 



40 

Or, it may be, that such an ambition may content 
itself with a more innocent mode of accomplishing 
its end, by affecting mere novelties of style, or mere 
nebulosities of thought. This, too, is an old trick of 
authorship, though it seems to have been almost for- 
gotten into newness. I do not know whether even 
you, Mr. President, who remember every thing, are 
aware how entirely Le Sage, almost a century and a 
half ago, anticipated and foreshadowed this whole 
modern school of nebulous thought and new-fangled 
phraseology. Let me recall to you, for an instant, the 
encounter of his hero with his old friend Fabricius, the 
son of Barber Nunnez, who, having been '^ seized with 
a rage for rhyme," and having suddenly conceived the 
idea " that he was born to eternize his name by works 
of Genius," turned author, commenced wit, and ^^soon 
wrote both in prose and in verse, and was equally good 
at every thing." This person, having been called on 
by Gil Bias for a taste of his quality, rehearsed first a 
sample of his sonnets. "If this sonnet, said he, is 
not intelligible, so much the better. The natural and 
simple won't do for sonnets, odes, and other works that 
require the sublime. The sole merit of these is in 
their obscurity ; and it is sufficient if the poet himself 
thinks he understands them." And then, having been 
induced to recite a specimen of his prose, which Gil 
Bias ventured to criticize, also, as wanting in perspi- 
cuity — " Poor ignoramus, cried Fabricius, thou dost 
not know then, that every prosaic writer who now 
aspires at the reputation of a delicate pen, affects that 
singularity of style, and those odd expressions, which 
shock thee so much. There are of us five or six bold 



41 



innovators, who have undertaken to make a thorough 
change in the language, and we will accomplish it 
(please God) in spite of Lope De Vega, Cervantes, 
and all the fine geniuses who cavil at our new modes 
of speech. We are seconded by a number of partisans 
of distinction, and have even some theologicians in our 
Cabal." * 

So true is it. Brethren, that all these labored 
affectations of modern style are without even the 
merit of ^ originality, and are only, after all, a kind of 
palimpsest of literary folly, — a revival of expedients 
for making a great show upon a small capital, which 
have long ago been exposed and exploded. 

These antics of literary ambition are so compara- 
tively harmless, however, when they begin and end in 
mere peculiarities of style or obscurities of sense, that 
one is hardly disposed to complain of them. Nay, 
there is now and then one, abroad or at home, who 
plays his fantastic pranks, with words or with thoughts, 
in a manner at once so captivating and so innocent, — 
and with whom an eccentric mannerism is seen to be 
so thin and transparent a veneering upon a sounds 
substantial, lignum vitce, stock, — that we can hardly 
withhold our admiration and applause. Yet truth, and 
reason, and sound wisdom, have such a close and na- 
tural affinity to simplicity and perspicuity, that it is 
difficult to avoid distrusting any one who approaches 
us in the mask of affected unintelligible'ness or oddity. 
And we cannot forget, that the same clouds which, at 
one moment, exhibit only the exquisite colors of the 
rainbow or the gorgeous hues of sunset, may, at the 

* Gil Bias, Book VII. ch. 13. 
6 



4 



o 



nextj bear along in their fleecy folds the deadly bolt 
or the destructive blast. Mere grotesquenesses of dic- 
tion or of conception may excite our mirth ; but when 
applied to serious and solemn themes^ they merit the 
sternest rebuke. 

When Professor Lorenz Oken, of Zurich, for exam- 
ple, (to come no nearer home,) tells us that ^^ animals 
are men who never imagine ; — that they are single 
accounts ; — that man is the whole of mathematics ; 
and that self-consciousness is a living ellipse," — we 
can smile. And we may hardly restrain a less equivo- 
cal and less dignified emotion than a smile, when he 
rises to a grander flight, and exclaims, — " Gazing 
upon a snail, one believes that he finds the prophesying 
goddess sitting upon her tripod. What majesty is in 
a creeping snail, what reflection, what earnestness, 
what timidity, and yet, at the same time, what firm 
confidence ! Surely, a snail is an exalted symbol of 
mind slumbering deeply within itself" * 

But when he invades the region of sacred things, 
when he intrudes upon the domain of Faith, when he 
rashly rends the vail and presumes to enter within the 
Holy of Holies, when he dares to say that "the 
Eternal is the nothing of nature, — that there exists 
nothing but nothing, nothing but the Eternal, — that 
for God to become real he must appear under the form 
of a sphere, — that God manifesting is an infinite 
sphere, — that God is a rotating globe, — and, finally, 
that the world is God rotating," — then, indeed, we 
begin to realize, that there may be worse things than 

^ I am indebted to President Hitchcock's admirable Lectures on " The Reli 
gion of Geology " for all I know of Professor Lorenz Oken and his writings. 



43 

unintelligibleness in this new-fangled nonsense, — that 
the cap and bells is quite too respectable a crown for 
such composers, — and that nothing but the volun- 
tary assumption of the strait-jacket, or the certainty 
that they are in a condition to need it, should screen 
them from the scorn and reprobation of intelligent? 
Christian men. 

Let me add that this learned Professor of natural 
science, who, — I rejoice to believe, forms an exception 
to the general mass of European savans at the present 
day, or, certainly an exception to the Lyells and Buck- 
lands, the Whewells and Herschells, the Owens and 
Murchisons and Hugh Millers of Old England, and 
whose writings, let me add, furnish so striking a con- 
trast to the beautiful strain of religious faith and 
reverence which eminently characterizes the discourses 
and essays of the distinguished Professors from his own 
more immediate region who adorn this University by 
their relation to it,* — is one of the last persons who 
has any excuse for the publication of such blasphemous 
speculations. There are fields enough for the wildest 
and most extravagant theorizings, within his own 
appropriate domain, without overleaping the barriers 
which separate things human and Divine. Indeed, I 
have often thought that modern science had afforded 
a most opportune and providential safety-valve for the 
intellectual curiosity and ambition of man, at a mo- 
ment when the progress of education, invention, and 
liberty, had roused and stimulated them to a pitch of 
such unprecedented eagerness and ardor. Astronomy, 
Chemistry, and more than all. Geology, with their inci- 

* Professors Agassiz and Guyot. 



u 

dental branches of study, have opened an inexhausti- 
ble field for investigation and speculation. Here, by 
the aid of modern instruments and modern modes of 
analysis, the most ardent and earnest spirits may find 
ample room and verge enough for their insatiate acti- 
vity and audacious enterprise, and may pursue their 
course not only without the slighest danger of doing 
mischief to others, but with the certainty of promoting 
the great end of scientific truth. 

Let them lift their vast reflectors or refractors to the 
skies, and detect new planets in their hiding-places. 
Let them waylay the fugitive comets in their flight, 
and compel them to disclose the precise period of 
their orbits, and to give bonds for their punctual return. 
Let them drag out reluctant satellites from "their 
habitual concealments." Let them resolve the unre- 
solvable nebulae of Orion or Andromeda. They need 
not fear. The sky will not fall, nor a single star be 
shaken from its sphere. 

Let them perfect and elaborate their marvellous pro- 
cesses for making the light and the lightning their 
ministers, for putting "a pencil of rays" into the hand 
of art, and providing tongues of fire for the communi- 
cation of intelligence. Let them foretell the path of 
the w^hirlwind and calculate the orbit of the storm. 
Let them hang out their gigantic pendulums, and make 
the earth do the work of describing and measuring 
her own motions. Let them annihilate human pain, 
and literally "charm ache with air, and agony with 
etherJ' The blessing of God will attend all their toils, 
and the gratitude of man will await all their triumphs. 

Let them dig down into the bowels of the earth. 



45 

Let them rive asunder the massive rocks, and unfohi 
the history of creation as it li s written on the pages 
of their piled up strata. Let them gather up the fos- 
sil fragments of a lost Fauna, reproducing the ancient 
forms which inhabited the land or the seas, bringing 
them together, bone to his bone, till Leviathan and 
Behemoth stand before us in bodily presence and in 
their full proportions, and we almost tremble lest these 
dry bones should live again ! Let them put nature to 
the rack, and torture her, in all her forms, to the 
betrayal of her inmost secrets and confidences. They 
need not forbear. The foundations of the round world 
have been laid so strong that they cannot be moved. 

But let them not think by searching to find out 
God. Let them not dream of understanding the 
Almighty to perfection. Let them not dare to apply 
their tests and solvents, their modes of analysis or 
their terms of definition, to the secrets of the spiritual 
kingdom. Let them spare the foundations of faith. 
Let them be satisfied with what is revealed of the 
mysteries of the Divine Nature. Let them not break 
through the bounds to gaze after the Invisible, — lest 
the day come when they shall be ready to cry to the 
mountains. Fall on us, and to the hills. Cover us 1 

Brethren, I have a deep feeling that one of the great 
wants of our time is a stronger sense of responsibility 
among educated and literary men for the word spoken 
and the word written. There needs more of that spirit 
with which Johnson concluded his Bambler, when he 
said, ^' I shall never envy the honors which wit and 
learning obtain in any other cause, if I can be remem- 
bered among the writers, who have given ardor to 



46 

virtue and confidence to truth." There needs more 
of that spirit to which Walter Scott, — who, as we have 
seen, was not unaware of the importance of complete 
novelty for literary success, — gave expression, when 
he said to a friend a few years before his death, — "I 
am drawing near to the close of my career. I am fast 
shuffling off the stage. I have beeb, perhaps, the 
most voluminous author of the day ; and it is a com- 
fort for me to think, that I have tried to unsettle no 
man's faith, to corrupt no man's principle, and that I 
have written nothing which, on my death-bed, I should 
wish blotted." There needs more of that spirit to 
which Alexander Pope gave brilliant and beautiful 
utterance, in the summing up of his survey of the 
Temple of Fame : — 

" Nor fame I slight, nor for her favors call, 
She comes unlooked for, if she comes at all. 
But if the purchase costs so dear a price, 
As soothing folly, or exalting vice ; 
Oh, if the Muse must flatter lawless sway. 
And follow still where fortune leads the way ; 
Or if no basis bear my rising name, 
But the fall'n ruins of another's fame ; — 
Then teach me. Heaven ! to scorn the guilty bays, 
Drive from my breast that wretched lust of praise ; 
Unblemish'd let me live, or die unknown ; 
Oh, grant an honest fame, or grant me none ! " 

Or better still might it be, if we could rise with 
Milton, to a strain of higher mood, and realize that 

" Fame is no plant that grows on mortal soil, 
Nor in the glistering foil 
Set off to the world, nor in broad rumor lies ; 
Bat lives and spreads aloft by those pure eyes. 
And perfect witness of all-judging Jove ; 
As he pronounces lastly on each deed, 
Of so much fame in Heaven expect thy meed." 



47 

And more especially are such deeper views of re- 
sponsibility, and such loftier ideas of a true and honest 
fame, needed among the speakers and writers of our 
own land. When Rome had risen to the highest pitch 
of grandeur and renown, her sagacious Satirist saw the 
cause of her approaching decline and fall in the growth 
of a vicious, corrupting, and enervating luxury. 

" Ssevior armis 
Luxuria incubuit, victumque ulciscitur orbem." 

This was an enemy which would be peculiarly fatal 
to a great Military Empire, which had built itself up 
by conquest, and which could only rely upon the man- 
hood, the courage, the physical energy and endurance 
of its people, to repel the invasions of Gauls or of 
Goths. But it is ours to live in a great moral empire ; 
— not, indeed, without solemn forms of Law, not with- 
out revered tribunals of Justice, not without organized 
systems of Government, but all resting on the ori- 
ginal consent of the governed, all appealing to the 
intelligence and morality of the people for their con- 
tinued support and maintenance, all relying on the 
more than atmospheric pressure of an enlightened 
public opinion for their stability and authority. And 
if some Juvenal were here to-day to lash the follies 
and portray the perils of our own land, I doubt if he 
could point out a more serious and salient source of 
danger, — I do not say danger of its decline and fall, 
for we admit no such ideas into our minds, no such 
words into our vocabulary, — but of its social deterio- 
ration, its internal distraction, its failure to fulfil and 
act out the whole great role which has been assigned 



48 

to it, — than the growing license and licentiousness of 
speech and of the press. 

Never before were there so many opportunities for 
the employment of tongues and of types, and never 
before were there so many temptations to the abuse of 
them. Consider what innumerable fields for the spoken 
word the institutions of our Country have thrown open. 
Not to speak of that more conspicuous arena of poli- 
tical debate, of which you and I, sir, should hardly 
care to say all that we think or to tell all that we 
know, — consider the multitudinous Legislative As- 
semblies, and Municipal Councils, and Caucuses, and 
Stumps, and Lyceums, and Associations, and Anniver- 
saries, and Courts of Law, and Temples of Religion, 
from which words of some sort are continually flowing 
into that great torrent of talk, which is always sound- 
ing in our ears like the rush of mighty waters. Every 
where there are itching ears with more than an Athe- 
nian eagerness for some new thing, and with a never- 
tiring willingness to reward facility and felicity of 
speech with the highest honors of the day. What 
Lord Sheffield said, with doubtful justice, perhaps, of 
political office in Great Britain in 1785, we may say 
almost without qualification of all offices and honors in 
our own land, at the present hour. " In this Country," 
said he, " no other proof is required of fitness for every 
office, than Oratory ; — that talent supplies the place 
of all knowledge, experience, and judgment." 

And then, the Press of America, — the periodical 
press, the pamphlet press, the light literature press, 
and above all, the Newspaper press of America, — 
that tremendous enginery which throws a fresh broad- 



49 . ' 

side at morning and evening and noonday beneath 
almost every roof in the Republic, and whose competi- 
tions so often betray it into fatal compliances with the 
prejudices, the passions, and even the profligacies of its 
supporters ; — who can estimate the influence of such 
an enginery upon our social and moral condition ? 
Who can calculate the pernicious effect upon the com- 
munity of a single, corrupt, licentious Newspaper, coin- 
ing slanders like a mint, changing phases like the 
moon, " with three hundred and sixty-five opinions in 
a year," upon every subject which it treats, spicing its 
daily and its nightly potions with every variety of 
obscene and sensual stimulant, controlled by no sense 
of responsibility, finding its easy way to the know- 
ledge and perusal of the young, the ignorant, and the 
inexperienced, and ministering and pandering to their 
diseased tastes and depraved appetites ! And who can 
calculate, on the other hand, the influence which might 
be produced, — nay, let me say, which is produced, — 
for I have in my mind, I thank Heaven, more than 
one example — by such an engine in the hands of 
upright, intelligent, independent, and conscientious 
men, — espousing and advocating neither ultraisms 
nor citraisms, neither a wild fanaticism nor a bigoted 
conservatism, with the fear of God before their eyes, 
with the love of truth in their hearts, and by whom 
the advancement of knowledge, of morality, of virtue, 
of right, and of righteousness, is not held subordinate 
to the popularity of the hour, or to the state of the 
subscription list. 

The present accomplished and eloquent Prime 
Minister of England, who has been personally known 

7 



50 

and esteemed by so many of us in this country as well 
as in his own,* has recently declared, somewhat em- 
phatically, on the floor of Parliament, that " as in these 
days the English Press aspires to share the influence 
of statesmen, so also it must share the responsibilities 
of statesmen." It would be more true in this country, 
I fear, to speak of statesmen aspiring to share the 
influence of the press. But, however it may be as to 
the point of relative aspiration, there can be little 
question as to that of comparative responsibility. Cer- 
tainly, if responsibility is to be measured by power, 
the responsibility of the press is greater than that of 
any statesman under the sun, however exalted he may 
be. Who has forgotten that splendid exclamation of 
another great English Minister and Orator, in 1810, 
when he challenged and defied all the authorities of 
the realm to contend against the power of the press ? 
" Give them," said he " a corrupt House of Lords ; give 
them a venal House of Commons ; give them a tyran- 
nical Prince; give them a truckling Court; and let 
me but have an unfettered press ; — I will defy them 
to encroach a hair's breadth upon the liberties of Eng- 
land." t Yes, an unfettered press is a match, and an 
overmatch, for almost any thing human. JSTeither 
tyranny nor freedom can stand against it. Neither 
corruption nor virtue can survive its systematic and 
persevering assaults. It may be rendered all but om- 
nipotent for evil ; it may be rendered all but omni- 
potent for good ; according to the ends to which it is 

* The Earl of Derby visited the United States many years ago as 
Mr. Stanley, 
t Sheridan. 



51 

directed, and the influences by which it is controlled. 
And the only reliable, earthly influence to which we 
can look for safety, is a sense of responsibility, moral 
and religious responsibility, on the part of its con- 
trollers. 

Brethren, tremendous powers are in all our hands, 
tremendous responsibilities are on all our shoulders. 
The educated men of America, to whom peculiarly the 
use of the tongue and of the pen have been imparted, 
must look to it seasonably that they are not false or 
faithless to the great obligations which their advan- 
tages and opportunities have imposed upon them. It 
is upon them, preeminently, that the responsibility 
rests for whatever abuses of speech or of the press 
may endanger our political or our moral condition. It 
is for them to determine (under God) whether the 
extraordinary gift of tongues which characterizes our 
time and country, shall be attended with something of 
the blessing of a Pentecost, or with more than the 
curse of a Babel ! It is for them to cultivate and to 
exhibit a greater caution as to what they speak and 
what they print. It is for them to restrain that yearn- 
ing after notoriety which leads to so much of vicious 
exaggeration and extravagance. It is for them to 
resist the temptations of poverty as well as of ambi- 
tion, and to learn how to spurn the bribe which would 
beguile them to the advocacy or the utterance of what 
is false or foul. It is for them, if need be, to with- 
stand even the temptations of their own genius, and to 
let even the lyre of a Mozart or the muse of a Byron 
lie mute forever, rather than renew the spectacle of 
the divinest melodies and most exquisite cantos prosti- 



52 

tilted to the loathsome lecheries of a Don Juan. It is 
for them to do more than this. It is for them not 
merely to put the curb of conscience upon their own 
tongues and pens, but to be vigilant and active in 
counteracting and disinfecting the corrupting and pol- 
luted streams which may issue from the pens and 
tongues of others. The scholars and educated men of 
America must feel and realize that they have a new 
mission assigned to them, growing out of the nature of 
our institutions, and essential, vitally essential, to their 
maintenance, — not that, mainly or primarily, of build- 
ing up a permanent American Literature, but that of 
creating and keeping alive a sound, healthy. Public 
Opinion upon all subjects of morality, religion, philo- 
sophy, and politics. 

Honor to those graduates of our own and other Uni- 
versities, who have already laid the foundations of our 
literary renown by works of History, Poetry, Biogra- 
phy, and Fiction, which have extorted a tribute of ad- 
miration from the old world hardly inferior to the glow 
of pride which they have kindled in the new. But 
this is the province of the few. A more practical, and 
a more practicable service remains for the many. It is 
for them to meet the common and daily exigencies of 
our social and political condition. They must not re- 
serve themselves only for the more stately occasions or 
the more critical emergencies of society. They must 
not discard even such commonplace things as truth, 
duty, virtue, patriotism, piety, from the list of subjects, 
which it may become even the most learned, the most 
accomplished, the most ambitious of them to treat. 
They must condescend to deal with common thoughts, 



53 

with common words, with common topics ; — or rather, 
they must learn to consider nothing as common or un- 
clean w^hich may contribute to the welfare of man, the 
safety of the republic, or the glory of God. It is 
theirs, by their efforts in the pulpit or at the bar, in 
the lecture room or the legislative hall, at the meetings 
of select societies, or at the grander gatherings of popu- 
lar masses, in the columns of daily papers, in the pages 
of periodical reviews or magazines, or through the scat- 
tered leaves of the occasional tract or pamphlet, to 
keep a strong, steady current of sound, rational, en- 
lightened sentiment always in circulation through the 
community. Let them remember that false doctrines 
will not wait to be corrected by ponderous folios or 
cumbrous quartos. The thin pamphlet, the meagre 
tract, the occasional address, the weekly sermon, the 
daily leader, — these are the great instruments of 
shaping and moulding the destinies of our country. 
In them, the scholarship of the country must manifest 
itself. In them, the patriotism of the country must 
exhibit itself. In them, the morality and religion of 
the country must assert itself. " The word in season," 
— that word of which Solomon understood the beauty 
and the value, when he likened it to apples of gold 
in pictures of silver, — it is that which is to arrest 
error, rebuke falsehood, confirm faith, kindle patriotism, 
commend morality and religion, purify public opinion, 
and preserve the State. 

Here, then. Brethren, where we first acquired so 
much of any faculty which we may possess for moving 
and influencing the minds of others, let us realize our 
responsibility for its use. Here let us resolve, that it 



54 

shall be by no spoken or written word of ours, that 
the public morality shall be shaken, the public faith 
unsettled, the public order endangered. Here let us 
resolve, that if wild and extravagant theories, — if the 
conceits and crudities of an unchastened speculation, 
— if a spirit of insubordination to divine or human 
authority, — if a rebellion of the intellect against 
every thing worthy of being the object of faith, 
strangely contrasted with the weakest and most cre- 
dulous entertainment of the most worthless supersti- 
tious impostures, — if a morbid sentimentalism, or a 
disorganizing socialism, or a disloyal sectionalism, or 
an irreverent and impious rationalism, — are to be 
among the dangers of our age and country, they 
shall find neither apostles nor apologists among us. 
Here, at these altars, let us consecrate our pens and 
our tongues, and all our parts and powers, as educated 
men, to our Country, our God, and Truth. Then, then, 
indeed, — so far, at least, as we are concerned, — shall 
that mighty current of Public Opinion, by which the 
course of human events, individual, social, and national, 
is forever to be so greatly directed and controlled, and 
from whose influence we cannot separate ourselves if 
we would, — be no longer in danger of becoming, as 
it advances and widens and deepens, a rushing and a 
raging flood, overflowing its banks, sweeping away 
landmarks, undermining the fabric of free government, 
and prostrating the tribunals of justice and the tem- 
ples of God, — nor yet shall it be in danger of losing 
itself, at any time, in a dull, profitless, pestilential 
stagnation, — but peaceful, healthful, progressive, fer- 
tilizing, it shall realize the vision of the Holy Waters 



55 

of Ezekiel, issuing from beneath the threshold of the 
sanctuary. It may rise to the ancles, it may rise to 
the knees, it may rise to the loins, it may rise to be a 
river, — "waters to swim in, a river that cannot be 
passed over ; " — but upon its banks shall grow all 
trees for meat, whose leaf shall not fade ; '' and the 
fruit thereof shall be for meat, and the leaf thereof for 
medicine," and "every thing shall live whither the 
River cometh ! " 

And now again, Mr. President and Brethren, I turn 
once more, for a moment, and in conclusion, to the 
occasion on which we are assembled. 

We have organized ourselves into an Association for 
the purpose of promoting the prosperity and welfare 
of this ancient and venerated Institution. We have 
come together at the prompting of a true filial piety, 
to concert measures for advancing the interests, and 
elevating the character, and extending the just renown 
of a beloved and cherished parent. Ten years have 
already elapsed since our First Anniversary Celebra- 
tion. Our first President, the accomplished, inflexible 
and irreproachable Statesman — our first Orator, the 
learned, profound and incomparable jurist — Adams 
and Story — are among us no more ; and those noble 
and congenial spirits, Pickering and Saltonstall, who 
were associated with them on our first Board of Di- 
rectors, have gone with them to their reward. I know 
not how many others of those who were earliest and 
most active in our ranks are no longer numbered 
among the living. We may not shut our ears to the 
voice which thus calls upon those of us who remain, 
to redeem the time by the adoption of some more sub- 



56 

stantial and effective measures than have yet been 
attempted, for promoting the great ends of our Asso- 
ciation. 

We can do much, — much by material aid, much by 
moral effort. And I rejoice to believe that the occasion 
will not pass away without the final arrangement of a 
plan, through which the good wishes and the good 
works of us all may find a worthy and noble consum- 
mation.* 

But I cannot forget that there are others, not yet 
included in our ranks, upon whom the reputation of 
the College rests far more even than upon ourselves. 
No efforts to advance the welfare of such an institu- 
tion from without, can ever supply the place of those 
which must proceed from within. It is not munificent 
endowments, — it is not splendid establishments, — it 
is not sumptuous libraries, — it is not accomplished 
and laborious professors, — it is not cheap tuition or 
free scholarships, — important and invaluable as they 
all are, — which can make this University all that it 
might be — all that we desire to see it. 

The just reputation and renown of such an institu- 
tion depend first and foremost upon the conduct and 
character of those who are successively the subjects of 
its care. Let there be seen here from year to year a 
high moral tone among the immediate students, a lofty 
standard of conduct as well as of scholarship, — a spirit 
of devotion to duty, of fidelity to themselves, and of 
allegiance to the government of the College, — and the 
prosperity of Harvard will be secure. 

It is you, Young Gentlemen of the Classes, who hold 
the destinies of the College in your hands, bound up 

* See note at the end. 



57 

in the same bundle of life with your own. And we 
are here to ask you, to implore you, to deal consider- 
ately, kindly, justly, with them both. We have trav- 
elled the road before you; we know^ all its tempta- 
tions and trials ; and we are here this day to bear 
witness to you, as you will bear witness in our place 
hereafter, to those who shall succeed you, that there 
is not one of us, from the most successful to the most 
unfortunate of us all, — from him who, having received 
ten talents, can this day produce other ten to the glory 
of God and his Alma Mater, to him who comes with 
his single talent, unimproved and hid in a napkin, — 
that there is not one among us all, who has not wished 
again and again, a thousand times, who does not 
still wish^ that he had made better use of the opportu- 
nities and advantag;es which you now enjoy. We are 
here to tell you, that there is not a recitation we ever 
neglected, nor a prayer we ever missed, nor an act of 
insubordination we ever committed, nor an unauthor- 
ized indulgence, nor an unworthy excess, of which we 
were ever guilty, which we do not remember with 
regret. We feel that nothing which we can do now, 
either for the College or for ourselves, can atone for 
what we left undone then. We feel that upon you, as 
Undergraduates, and not upon us, as Alumni, the hopes, 
the character, the honor of our common mother prima- 
rily and principally depend. We appeal to you all, 
as those whom we trust soon to welcome within our 
own ranks, not to trifle with so great a trust, not to 
neglect so great a responsibility. To each one of you 
we appeal, in a spirit of more than brotherly regard 
and affection, — Reverere, r ever ere de te tantam cxpec- 
tationem ! 

8 



58 



NOTE TO PAGE 56. 

The following " Plan for Scholarships," was proposed and adopted 
on this occasion : 

The Alumni op Harvard College, assembled around the festive 
board of Alma Mater, in July, 1852, desirous of performing some act, 
which shall at once redound to the good of the College, and cement more 
closely the bonds, which unite classmates with each other, and classes 
with the University, and in the hope that their act may have the addi- 
tional recommendation of extending the benefits of Harvard College 
instructions to increased numbers of meritorious youth of our country, 
hereby assent to and adopt the following plan for establishing a system 
of Scholarships in the College, viz. : — 

1. A Scholarship shall be established by the payment of the sum of 
two thousand dollars to the Treasurer of Harvard College. 

2. Every Class, which has one or more living members, shall have a 
right to establish one or more Scholarships. 

3. No appropriation shall be made of the income of any Scholarship 
Fund unless the capital sum invested shall be, or shall have become by 
accumulation, at least two thousand dollars. 

4. Any Class may pay any portion of a Scholarship Fund, at any time, 
to the Treasurer of the College in sums of not less than one hundred 
dollars at any one time. 

5. The Treasurer of the College shall be requested to keep a separate 
account with each Scholarship, and to designate it by the year of the 
graduation of the Class, which shall have contributed the fund to endow 
such Scholarship. 

6. Whenever a Class shall have made provision for a Scholarship, by 
the contribution of $2,000, or when the contribution shall have reached 
that sum by accumulation, it shall be competent for such Class, annually, 
to nominate any meritorious young man, then a member of College, or 
about entering, as a suitable person to receive the income of the Scholar- 
ship of such Class, whether a descendant of a member of the Class or 
otherwise. 

7. The Corporation, on consultation with the Faculty, may refuse to 
confirm any appointment made by a Class, without assigning reasons, and 
they may appropriate the income of the Scholarship of such Class for the 
remainder of the year to any meritorious student. 

8. In selecting candidates to receive the benefits of Scholarships, 
neither the Class, the Corporation, nor the Faculty shall receive applica- 



59 

tion, from any individual, to be placed upon the foundation of a Scholar- 
ship, except in writing. 

9. The income arising from any Scholarship not appropriated in any 
year, shall be invested as the capital for a new Scholarship, and any 
Scholarships so created shall, when completed, be termed University 
Scholarships, to be under the sole control of the Corporation. 

10. No Class shall be allowed to make a nomination of any person to 
be the recipient of the income of a Scholarship at any other time than 
during Commencement-week ; and in case no nomination shall be made 
during the said week, the Corporation, on consultation with the Faculty, 
may appoint some one to be the recipient for that year, if they see fit so 
to do. 

Nathaniel B. Shurtleff, Secretary. 

Boston, July 23, 1852. 



LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 



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